Living Cities Landscape Lab: Nashin Mahtani

  • Public lecture



How can we adapt to the new extreme climate? Join disaster management expert Nashin Mahtani for this free talk at MSD.

Nashin Mahtani is the director of Yayasan Peta Bencana (Disaster Map Foundation), a South-East Asian non-profit developing humanitarian technologies for community-led disaster co-management.

In this keynote lecture, Mahtani will respond to the recent climate disasters in Australia (and the ideologies that attend to them) with some lessons from the tropics.

Mahtani’s practice spans practical, academic, and activist modes, drawing upon ethnography, design research, geography and philosophy in order to address questions of social and environmental justice.

These expanded tools of design point toward a 21st century urban practice, one that is prepared to face the climate emergency.

Bio

Nashin Mahtani is the director of Yayasan Peta Bencana (Disaster Map Foundation), a South-East Asian non-profit developing humanitarian technologies for community-led disaster      management. She co-led the expansion of the life-saving platform PetaBencana.id, from a real-time flood mapping platform serving 50 million people in Indonesia to a multi-hazard mapping platform serving over 350 million people in South East Asia. Mahtani is also the co-founder of the Climate Emergency Software Alliance (CESA), a non profit organization developing and maintaining one of the largest open source projects for climate adaptation.

With a background in architecture, Mahtani’s applied and research investigations center around water polities and infrastructures, communication and media philosophies, and epigenetic adaptations. She is also principal co-investigator of MERA, a research and design collective investigating the future of governance structures foregrounded in ecological homeostasis.

Mahtani is listed in the Forbes Asia ’30 Under 30’ 2021, Semi-finalist Global Citizen Prize: Cisco Youth Leadership Award in 2019; Southeast Asian Women Leader, YSEALI in 2020; and Women Innovator, Information Society Innovation Fund in 2018.

This talk is presented by the Living Cities Landscape Lab, Naomi Milgrom Foundation and the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne.